E&OE...............................................................................................................................
Thank you very much to Captain David Eldridge,
the Chairman of my Taskforce on Youth Homelessness. To my colleague,
Warwick Smith, the Minister for Family Services and Senator Helen
Coonan, a Senator from New South Wales, other representatives, particularly
of the Sydney City Mission, of other welfare organisations, the
St Vincent de Paul Society and also to other officers of the Salvation
Army.
One of the very first things that did as Prime
Minister was to get together a group of people to launch the taskforce
into youth homelessness. It was a commitment that I had made in
a speech I delivered as Opposition Leader to ACOSS late in 1995
and it arose out of my personal desire after discussion with a lot
of parents and also with others involved in the welfare field that
we ought to try and find out whether or not there was some better
or more improved way of dealing with the challenge of youth homelessness
and something that more directly focussed on the desirability of
trying to achieve as much as we possibly could, reconciliation between
young people who leave home and other members of their families.
We all of course have an idealised view of family
life. All of us hope that the maximum number of young people in
the Australian community will experience growing up in a loving,
secure and stable home environment where the welfare of children
is the central concern and greatest commitment through life of their
parents. Now that is the ideal and it is an ideal that is worth
restating even in the most cynical of times and it's an ideal
to which all of us should be committed and it's an ideal to
which all of us should lend our energy because it is indisputable
that the greatest gift that any young person can have is a loving
home environment. It provides them with assets for life which cannot
be matched by anything else. Having stated the ideals we must of
course recognise that sadly, not all of our young people have the
opportunity of being given that very secure start in life. Not all
of our young people are provided with a secure and loving home environment.
There are complex reasons why that secure environment
is not available in every case. They are the product of changing
societal attitudes, they are the product of economic difficulty,
they are the product of unemployment, they are the product of all
sorts of pressures and what society must do, whilst always reaffirming
its belief in striving to the ideal in the maximum number of cases,
what society ought to try and do is to provide a network of help
and counsel and advice and an understanding to help those people
who do not have that precious gift that is available to so many
other young people in the community.
I have spoken in the past few months a great deal
of the importance of there being a shared endeavour in our community
between individuals, the Government and the great community organisations
of modern society. Individuals alone can't always look after
themselves. Many can but some can't. Through no fault of their
own they do need help and a compassionate society ought to provide
that help. The Government alone can't provide that help although
the Government has a very important role to play. The Government
has community resources available to it and it has an overall responsibility
to set the scene and to provide a framework. And the third great
arm of that shared endeavour is represented here today by magnificent
organisations such as the Salvation Army, the Society of St Vincent
de Paul and the various city missions throughout Australia, and
they are the third very important arm. And one of the significant
things that I wanted to do in my approach to youth homelessness
was to involve those organisations to a much greater extent and
that was because I had the very strong belief that they had more
coalface experience and a greater practical day to day understanding
of it than any other group of men and women in our society because
they deal with it, they deal with it day to day, they understand
the sense of despair and the sadness and the loneliness and the
deprivation that is the lot of young people who are afflicted by
homelessness.
I have also had the opportunity of witnessing the
joy and the happiness that can come when there is a reconciliation
between a young person and his or her family members and that is
the rewarding part of it. I wanted to involve them. I wanted the
Government to, by setting up the taskforce, demonstrate its commitment
to this particular issue. I also wanted there to be a greater understanding
of the sense of alienation that some parents in the past had felt
towards the process of assessing the entitlement of young people
to the youth homelessness allowance. I had had many complaints as
a Member of Parliament in my own electorate and also in my position
as Opposition Leader from parents who said that the process shut
them out, that if one of their family members left home and sought
the allowance, they often were shut out of the process, they didn't
feel part of it. They felt that they were held responsible totally
without having an opportunity of putting their case.
I have heard reports from all around Australia
from my colleagues of angry meetings of parents complaining about
a process that had shut them out and with so many of these things,
there was of course an element of truth in that. There was also
in some cases an element of exaggeration so I wanted one of the
things, one of the elements of this task force's work to be
a focus on ways in which the parents of children who were homeless
could feel part of the process, could feel that an adverse judgement
was not automatically being made on them and that they were given
an opportunity of putting their point of view, of understanding
the process but above everything else, an emphasis on reconciliation,
of early intervention and of involving community groups. And out
of that taskforce came the launch of a series of pilot projects
that the Government funded all around Australia and one of those
pilot projects of course is represented here today and that is a
pilot project which is a joint endeavour of the Salvation Army in
Sydney and of the Sydney City Mission, and it's an example
of how a different approach can produce results. This is an area
of course where you have to work very hard to get sometimes only
a modest return.
There are successes but there are also a lot of failures. But the
most important thing is that there is a shared commitment represented
here today between a lot of individuals who have been sadly touched
by the problem of youth homelessness. Amongst the audience are some
young people who are part of the group that we are trying to help.
There are also parents of those young people who are also people
who are equally deserving of help and understanding. There's
also here of course the representatives of the organisations who
are so very directly involved and finally, of course, there's
the Government, and in that old cliche the Government's always
here to help but what we are trying to do with this is to get a
better of understanding of a very significant human problem.
We gather here today in the largest city in Australia.
It's a very beautiful city and there's a lot to be proud
of to be a citizen of Sydney as most of us who are here today, we
are citizens of Sydney as well as firstly and most importantly being
Australians. But it's also a fact of life that in any big city
there's a lot of loneliness and there's a lot of individual
sadness and there are a lot of people who are reaching out for help
and above all, they want company and they want understanding and
I have had many discussions over the time that I have been Prime
Minister with people involved in trying to help young people and
I have talked to people who have been involved in providing help
line services.
I remember talking to a De La Salle brother who
is involved in the running of a help line service in Brisbane and
what he told me was that the most common area of assistance that
people wanted when they rang up was help in how to relate more effectively
and how to communicate more effectively with their parents and their
brothers and sisters and their friends. And it's a very simple
yet rather sad thing that what is so obviously lacking in the lives
of many people is the opportunity and the capacity to talk to the
people you want to talk to most. All of us I think are inadequate
sometimes in expressing our feelings. All of us are inadequate in
communicating effectively with people we should communicate effectively
with. Of course one of the reasons, as you all know, that people
leave home and one of the reasons why families break down and children
no longer think that they have anything much in common with their
parents and vice versa is a simple difficulty in communication and
a failure to understand each other and a failure to be able to talk
directly to each other.
I do not claim and my Government does not claim
for a moment to have the answers, all of the answers to the problem
of youth homelessness. We do have a commitment to try some new ways
of tackling the problem. We recognise it, it flows in part from
economic circumstances. We recognise in part that it flows from
changed attitudes towards individual responsibility. We recognise
that it flows in part from different generational attitudes towards
the authority of parents and the relationship between children and
parents. There are a whole lot of reasons but we're very genuine
in our desire to find some of those answers. We are very grateful
for Captain Eldridge's personal contribution and also the contribution
of the other members of his taskforce. He comes as so many people
in this room do, from a great Christian organisation, from an organisation
that is committed to the welfare of young people within our community
and I very warmly thank him and all of his colleagues.
I am very happy to announce, ladies and gentlemen,
that I have informed my colleague, Warwick Smith that we are going
to extend the funding and therefore the continuity of the pilot
programmes by providing an additional $2.3 million and that will
allow funding to go on for another six months. We've done that
because we think the pilot programmes are so successful and they
have provided so many new insights and better understandings, and
given a better emphasis on the importance of reconciliation, not
to pretend for a moment that the ideal always exists because plainly
it doesn't. There are many sad examples of where it doesn't
exist but equally, to recognise that if we can give a greater emphasis
to reconciliation between parents and children, to the role of great
organisations, I think all of us would be very grateful.
So could I end again by thanking all of you who
have contributed. I want to thank the representatives of the Department
of Family Services and their Minister, Warwick, for the contribution
that they have made. It is a partnership and it does involve individuals,
the Government and organisations. I do want to thank the Salvation
Army, the Brotherhood of St Laurence, the Wesley Central Mission,
the Society of St Vincent de Paul, Anglicare and of course the Independent
City Missions of Australia, and indeed, all others who contributed.
And I thank the young people and the parents who have been touched
by this programme, I hope in a beneficial way, for their attendance.
It's a very important, personal commitment of mine and of my
Government and I hope it can be said that it has made a difference
and it has contributed to a better understanding of an immensely
challenging human and social issue in modern Australia.
Thank you.
ENDS